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Monday, August 27, 2007

Like Dave Barry, I Swear I Am Not Making This Up

Aidan, in a shocking development, is learning his letters. At the tender age of 19 months.

He has a LeapFrog bus that he's been obsessed with, and it has all the letters on the side. When you push a letter, it tells you what the letter is, what sound it makes, etc.

Last night my mom and I were sitting on the couch talking, and Aidan was playing with his bus. We heard it ask him, "Can you find the letter O?" And next thing we know, we hear, "Yay! I'm the letter O."

I looked at her. She looked at me. Both of us were in utter disbelief. "No," I said. "No way. That can't be!"

I dismissed it as a fluke, when it presented a new challenge to him. "Can you find the letter I?" We watched and waited, holding our breath. "Yay! I'm the letter I."

I couldn't believe it. How did this happen?

So I decided to test him myself. Sure enough, he passed with flying colors, pointing out both O and I on demand. I tested a few others, but so far he seemed to only know those two.

That night at dinner he pointed excitedly to my T-shirt. I leaned in close, thinking he would point to the picture. But no, he pointed to the O in RAINBOW RIDGE. Then we spent the rest of dinner with me hunched over his tray, reciting the letters over and over and over as he pointed to them in random order.

This morning, my mom told me that she thinks he's also picked up a recognition of the letter L, since he passed the L quiz on the bus while waiting for his breakfast.

And it took just a split second for it to hit me...

How fitting is that? That for a baby born in Texas, the first letters he can pick out are O-I-L?